reed writes

A great deal of drivel has been written about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and its significance. Hardly anyone, however has related the killing to U.S.-Canadian-European foreign policy. It is especially related to American foreign policy. Bhutto made the ill-advised decision to return to Pakistan, knowing that her action would further destablize that country and place her own life in danger. But like so many ambitious politicians, she chose to ignore the danger in the hope of gaining power. She enjoyed the tacit support and encourgement of other unwise politicians such as Bush and Harper in going through with her misguided plan.

So far, the most astute and reasoned commentary on the affair comes from A.J Rosmiller.

He is a fellow of the National Security Network and a former officer of the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency and the author of this book, among others.

He writes at Americablog.

I was hoping it wouldn’t happen, but it has happened. Earlier in the week Stephen Harper gave an interview, in which he said that the Dalai Lama was not a call girl.  Brian Mulroney may have a yen for corruption but Stephen Harper apparently has a different kind of yen…and not the kind you spend in Japan.

Mulroney met a man in hotel rooms for the purpose of receiving envelopes stuffed with cash.

Stephen Harper, on the other hand would not meet a man in a hotel room; instead, he invited the Dalai Lama to his office. After all, Harper said, the Dalai Kama is not a "call girl". Evidently Harper is familiar with the idea that you meet call girls in hotels.

I expected this idiotic bit of crap would die a natural death and go away. But this morning my inbox contained an email from the American website "Crooks and Liars". The top story was our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.

Harper has gone from being just a national embrassment, to being an international embarrassment. An oaf and an inarticulate buffoon with a penchant for gnomic turns of phrase.

You can read the story here at Crooks and Liars. Some of the comments are astounding.

This morning a Shakespearian sonnet fell into my mailbox and I read it with relish…his most understandable poem yet in my opinion. He didn’t give titles to his sonnets so this one is known simply as Roman numeral number CVI or 106 in our system.

CVI.

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have express’d
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And, for they look’d but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Had eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

In a previous post, I predicted that Conrad Black’s sentence would fall somewhere between 2.5 and 9 years.

Monday morning in Chicago, Black was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison…that’s 6.5 years, roughly in the middle of my predicted term.

Mr. Black will be required to serve a minimum of 85% of his sentence before being allowed to apply for parole.

This is a  victory for the shareholders of the company he looted and a just sntence in terms of jail time. However, Mr. Black still faces a raft of civil suits, including one launched by the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York.

It’s not over yet. By the time it is over, Mr. Black will be forced to live off the royalties of whatever books he is able to write. He’ll certainly have the time to come up with some ideas…in his breaks between washing prison windows and mopping the floors at 12 cents an hour…money which he plans to invest in a variety of creative projects.

It’s interesting that many famous men, including Brian Mulroney and Elton John, wrote letters of support for Mr. Black.

However, it’s even more interesting that two of his business collegues declined to do so. One of those was the real estate tycoon, Donald Trump…the other the accused war criminal Henry Kissinger.

All in all, a fine day for the U.S. justice system, the media, which has rid itself of a destructive element and the people of the United States whose treasury will receive several of Black’s forfeited millions.

As to Mr. Black’s so-called "hidden wealth", most of that is under the care of his raven-haired (artificially coloured) wife, Barbara. The question Black’s former friends, associates and victims are asking is this: "Will the social climbing Barbara line up at the prison entrance, with all the other wives waiting to visit their incarcerated criminal spouses"?

Sophisticated Colonialism

When our systems are shocked…when there’s an intense shock to our physical world, or to our hearts and minds and psyche’s, we are vulnerable.

In her very important book, "The Shock Doctrine", Naomi Klein, Canada’s poliitical Diva sans pareil, shows how the powers that be – use natural and contrived shocks to mold the economic world after their own beliefs and self-interest.

What she explains so clearly in her book is that we must become more aware of what amounts to the "privatization of democracy", which leads to disenfranchisement.

Her book is a detailed examination of a new kind of colonialism. The classic example is Iraq. She describes the war in Iraq as an "act of armed robbery".

The fundamental point Klein makes is that western leaders don’t care about ordinary people. They care only about preserving, however desperately, the "trappings" of democracy, but focus mainly on the supremacy of a narrow form of capitalism that benefits only a select few.

There is nothing wrong with either capitalism or democracy, unless either or both are perverted and exploited by unscrupulous, power mad leaders who see profit potential as the result of tragic disasters.

Must Reading For All Who Care about Democracy.